' ' ., ,�- NONIMPORTATION AND THE SEARCH FOR ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE IN VIRGINIA, 1765-1775 BRUCE ALLAN RAGSDALE Charlottesville, Virginia B.A., University of Virginia, 1974 M.A., University of Virginia, 1980 A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Corcoran Department of History University of Virginia May 1985 © Copyright by Bruce Allan Ragsdale All Rights Reserved May 1985 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: 1 Chapter 1: Trade and Economic Development in Virginia, 1730-1775 13 Chapter 2: The Dilemma of the Great Planters 55 Chapter 3: An Imperial Crisis and the Origins of Commercial Resistance in Virginia 84 Chapter 4: The Nonimportation Association of 1769 and 1770 117 Chapter 5: The Slave Trade and Economic Reform 180 Chapter 6: Commercial Development and the Credit Crisis of 1772 218 Chapter 7: The Revival Of Commercial Resistance 275 Chapter 8: The Continental Association in Virginia 340 Bibliography: 397 Key to Abbreviations used in Endnotes WMQ William and Mary Quarterly VMHB Virginia Magazine of History and Biography Hening William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large; Being� Collection of all the Laws Qf Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature in the year 1619, 13 vols. Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia Rev. Va. Revolutionary Virginia: The Road to Independence, 7 vols. LC Library of Congress PRO Public Record Office, London co Colonial Office UVA Manuscripts Department, Alderman Library, University of Virginia VHS Virginia Historical Society VSL Virginia State Library Introduction Three times in the decade before the Revolution. Vir­ ginians organized nonimportation associations as a protest against specific legislation from the British Parliament. The first association. in 1769. prohibited a wide range of British imports and was to remain in effect until Parliament repealed the Townshend duties of 1767. The organizers of nonimportation in Virginia expected that the reduction of the colony's valuable import trade would persuade British merchants and manufacturers to lobby for the removal of all revenue duties and other restrictions on the American trade. A revised Association of 1770 incorporated the merchants in the colony and established local enforcement committees in order to increase the pressure on the British. Virginians entered a third association in August 1774 in response to the Coercive Acts. This most comprehen­ sive of all provincial associations instituted a complete boycott of British goods and announced plans to suspend Virginia's export trade in the following year if Parliament failed to repeal the recent restrictions on trade and government in Massachusetts. The Virginia Association of 1774 served as the model for the Continental Association adopted by the general congress of colonies in October 1774. These formal associations were preceded by various measures of commercial resistance against the Stamp Act. In 2 1765 and 1766 Virginians closed their local courts to debt cases, local groups initiated manufacturing projects, and individuals reduced their purchases of British imports, all in an effort to convince Parliament to rescind the stamp tax. In each instance of nonimportation and commercial resistance, organizers in Virginia intended the agreements to be more than a form of political strategy. The policy of nonimportation as it developed in Virginia was also a res­ ponse to changes in the imperial economy over the previous forty years. The gentry planters who initiated the associa­ tions expected commercial resistance to protect themselves and the colony at large from the growing risks of Virginia's trade with Great Britain. By lessening involvement with tobacco, reducing imports of British goods, and limiting the influence of British merchants in the colony, the supporters of nonimportation hoped to reassert their own authority over the colonial economy. Popular support wavered after 1766, but by 1774 the overwhelming majority of landholders in Vir­ ginia were convinced the goals of economic independence as embodied in the associations were the best way to protect their interests and to promote the development of the colony. These larger goals of the nonimportation associa­ tions are central to explaining the distinctive character of the resistance to British authority in Virginia. The search for economic independence is particularly important for understanding why the great planters led this most stable of 3 American political societies into the Revolution. Jacob M. Price and other historians have explored in great detail the new developments in the Chesapeake trade 1 during the mid-eighteenth century. Comparatively little work, however, has been done on the effects of these commer­ cial changes on imperial relations or the coming of the Revolution in Virginia. Even the Progressive historians, who emphasized the economic sources of the split with Great Britain in other colonies, paid slight attention to Virgin­ ia. Arthur M. Schlesinger, in his The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution (still the most complete study of commercial resistance in the colonies), found in Virginia few of the internal divisions that he believed inspired the associations in the commercial colonies. The failure of Virginia to reduce imports in 1769 or 1770 was further reason for Schlesinger to dismiss the importance of nonim­ 2 portation associations in the Chesapeake. The only extended Progressive study of the Revolution in Virginia was Isaac S. Harrell's Loyalism in Virginia. Harrell, devel­ oping an idea proposed by Charles Beard, described the Revo­ lution in Virginia as a struggle between indebted planters and merchant creditors. The patriot cause had been an attractive opportunity for Virginia planters to repudiate 3 their British debts. By the 1960s historians generally rejected Harrell's 4 simple notion of the Revolution as a movement to escape repayment of planters' debts. In the most thorough discus- sion of the issue. Emory G. Evans went so far as to deny that the colony's pervasive and chronic debt had any direct effect on the resistance to British authority before 1774. While the Progressives' emphasis on debt evasion certainly was misplaced. historians in the last twenty years have recognized that the Revolution in Virginia is not explained solely by the constitutional conflict emphasized by Evans and others.4 Gordon Wood was the first to identify what he called "a social crisis within the ruling group" that he believed lay behind the gentry's active involvement in the resistance to Great Britain. In the 1760s and 1770s gentry planters in Virginia expressed an exaggerated fear that they were no longer capable of maintaining their position of social and political leadership. Wood suggested that the Revolution in Virginia was in part an effort to restore the great planters' legitimacy. Jack P. Greene has examined several of the specific manifestations of the gentry's anxiety in the decade before the Revolution. The sources of this crisis and its effects on the Revolution have proved more difficult to identify. Rhys Isaac has located the origin of the crisis in the Baptists' challenge to the great planters and their Anglican establishment. Joseph A. Ernst emphasizes the economic pressures resulting from British restrictions on the monetary policy of Virginia. In a 5 renewal of the Progressives' interpretation, Marc Egnal focuses on the tensions between competing elites within the colony and British impediments to western expansion.6 The economic life of Virginians, particularly their commercial relations with Great Britain, promises to explain something of the crisis that afflicted Virginia's great planters in the 1760s and contributed to the resistance movement preceding the Revolution. Trade was the most frequent form of contact between Virginians and the British. The colony's trade was the most valuable in North America and directly involved every level of market producer in Virginia. Furthermore, the trade that was so thoroughly a part of most Virginians' lives was transformed in the forty years before Independence. The implications of that change and the reaction of the great planters and resident merchants set the stage for the commercial resistance that began in 1765. After 1730 Virginia planters found that the expansion of tobacco markets, the infusion of British credit, and the growth in the supply of slave labor allowed them to increase their income at the same time that a sophisticated and concentrated commercial organization in Great Britain fastened its control over the colonial economy. The new opportunities for Virginians ironically accompanied the rise of the direct trade, which, with its centralized management of all business in the colony and its ties to European 6 markets. insured a narrow pattern of economic development in Virginia. British merchants extended credit for the culti­ vation of tobacco rather than any diversification of staple agriculture. The marketing and shipping of Virginia's exports remained the monopoly of British traders rather than serving to provide opportunities for the development of the independent merchant community in the colony. The introduc­ tion of the Scottish store system in Virginia extended the dependence on tobacco cultivation to small planters through­ out the newly-settled Piedmont. The British credit used to encourage land and slave purchases and thereby increase tobacco production resulted in chronic indebtedness among